Revisiting the Subaltern in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things

Abstract

Arundhati Roy is one of the “most followed writers” in contemporary India whose debut novel The God of Small Things (1997) earned her not only the Booker Prize but also the reputation of the biggest selling book by a non-expatriate Indian author. She waited twenty years to publish her second novel The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017). Both novels involve silencing of the marginalized other in a society that is conscious of its class, caste, and gender privileges. They are the three big things in Roy’s maiden novel that need the healing touch of small things such as love and hope. On the surface, Velutha, in The God of Small Things (Henceforth, TGST), is the most obvious candidate for the titular “god of small of things” who dared to transgress the moral codes and social space of the upper caste, and was forcibly silenced for his transgression. His lover Ammu, despite her class status, received a similar fate of silencing for her gender role in a patriarchy. Roy’s concerns for the small things, the subaltern groups, are evident in her innumerable political pamphlets, journalistic essays as well as in her two novels. Subalternity as a concept in the sub-continental context was popularized by the India-based Marxist historians who extended the original application of Gramsci and wrote under the label, The Subaltern Studies Collective (1980-1992), to address subordination of class, caste, age, gender, or any other office. Roy in her fiction and non-fiction both speak for the subalterns and speak of the subalterns. Her efforts have been to create awareness to empower the marginalized groups. However, big in praxis, Roy refrains from any theoretical label or underpinning. I shall argue that Roy challenged class consciousness without fully subscribing to Marxist ideology, she defended gender rights without aligning herself with mainstream feminism, and she protested against the caste-system without tagging herself as an abolitionist. I shall go a step further in claiming that the unique system of caste in India does not allow Roy to fully subscribe to any pre-ordered theoretical model to analyze subalternity. Of the three big things (class, caste and gender) elaborated in my dissertation, caste for me is the greatest concern that Roy unpacks in TGST. The aim of this dissertation is to use various postcolonial lenses to offer a close reading of Roy’s first novel to understand the causes of subalternity in contemporary India. The dissertation also questions Roy’s choice of genre. Both her fiction and non-fiction are replete with her concerns for human rights and minority issues. I shall try to understand why she needed the fictive garb to represent some factual violations of human rights. In so doing, I shall focus on the complementary role played by Roy’s fiction and non-fiction in projecting her artistic arm.